A God in Ruins

  They all climbed into ore carts, the tracks following the narrow tunnel some two hundred yards.

  And there before them burst open a humongous cave. With its sister caves, it could have held the Titanic. Weapons of all kinds and apparatus and apparel for war lined the cave walls.

  At this point Wreck confided they also had a dozen Stinger missiles, purchased back from the Afghan rebels, the brand that had half destroyed the Soviet air force.

  At the ranch, the basement under the cellar was a cell of megalomania for Esteemed Personage. Huge survey maps of the Four Corners region hung on the walls with troop markings to indicate a never-ending mock battle.

  A computer on a rudimentary system kept in contact with a plethora of patriots: the White Aryan Christian Arrival and wooded militias. It also tracked gun sales, gun shows, gun legislation, and their inventory of hate literature.

  Maud counted a dozen to two dozen men who were probably on the payroll. She distrusted Wreck’s boast that he could pull a thousand patriots onto the ranch on any given weekend; nonetheless, how many festering sore spots like White Wolf existed?

  Oswald Hudson dismissed his communications people and ensconced himself behind an enormous desk decorated with phones of different colors. Behind him, a blown-up poster of Tim McVeigh.

  One of the Mexican women served coffee and pastry and opened a hidden cart of booze. Red grabbed the woman’s backside as she dared brush past him flirtingly close.

  Maud threw questions, trying to get past her feeling that she was in a netherworld of the impossible.

  “I got me this little country to run,” Hudson went on. “My men would follow me to hell. These patriots are as good as Army Rangers, Marines, Seals. With a dozen militia ranches in the Four Corners under my command, and another hundred around the country we could coordinate an attack on the Golden Gate Bridge, the Lincoln Tunnel, the Capitol, the Superdome, the harlot film studios.”

  He poured a bunch of cognac into his glass and wiped the fallen drops on his mustache with the back of his hand.

  Maud was damned good at covering her disbelief. “So, tell me, Wreck, what is your target?”

  “Hoover Dam,” he answered, not skipping a beat.

  “How?” she asked.

  Hudson cleared his throat, lowered his voice to “highly confidential.”

  “I am in the process of designing a radio-controlled submarine torpedo. We will launch it, when the word comes, into Lake Meade and set it to blow up at the dam footings.”

  Now to Nam. Wreck confided that he should have been made a full colonel in Vietnam. “My battalion was sent into a large gook village near Phen Dok. As we advanced up the hill for Phen Dok, can you believe it, my fucking knee gave out. Old football injury at Michigan. Some sports writers said the knee kept me from being one of the great all-Americans. This time, taking the hill, it cost me a Congressional fucking Medal of Honor. My men just broke down and cried. They’d follow me to hell.”

  Maud spent the afternoon pondering mightily. She sensed a presence. Red Peterson had entered through an adjoining door and taken up the rocking chair close by.

  “He’s not as crazy as he makes out,” Red said. “He does the drill because his people want it and because felons need a place to hide.”

  “You knew this White Wolf would shade my thinking,” she said.

  “Got a better depot and transit point? No? Then you have to deal with the mad hatter who runs this one. Besides, Miss Maud, you’ll never have to see Wreck Hudson again. Remember, I own him. Like you said—or was it me who said it to you?--it all boils down to trust between us.”

  When did I last trust? Maud wondered. She’d built a firewall between her activities and the ultimate end of a gun barrel. The dirty bunch, the dusty road bunch, the busted pickup truck bunch, the beer-sucking bunch at the roadside hell saloon, the bunch who could never face their own failures.

  So, what did the bunch do? They created that hovering monster, The Government, who was really responsible for their misery.

  “Wasn’t it inevitable, Maud, to come to this place?” she thought. Thank God, Red Peterson was with her. Lust and all, she felt safe with him now.

  “Maud, every once in a while we stop, we think, we dislike ourselves. We don’t fire these weapons. Shut us down and ten more like us will pop up. Men were butchering each other with sticks and stones till they discovered bows and arrows. War is intrinsic in the human race, driven by the most passionate of all human drives, greed.”

  “Spoken like a true Jeffersonian. Have you ever looked in the mirror and spit?”

  “Yeah .. . once. I got a hymie friend in Panama, a jeweler. I saw the tattoo on his arm. What we are doing by comparison is just keeping the boys amused.”

  Maud spent the balance of daylight pacing her little porch in contemplation. The White Wolf Ranch was perfect. Red Peterson was some brilliant piece of personnel. She had to weigh that against the questionable mental balance of Oswald Hudson.

  Furthermore, who were these people around?

  She had trained herself not to be at home when moral issues came knocking at her door. This time they pounded through to her.

  Moral issues cause people to think of their grandchildren and become all teary. Red had explained it perfectly. She and he were only a pair of folks servicing a human need for blood lust.

  The lunch and liquor caught up to her. The sounds of her wretching brought Red into her room. On her knees over the toilet bowl, Miss Maud just wasn’t all that sexy.

  “Deep and abiding love,” he said, adjusting the angle of her throw, “means holding each other’s head over the bucket. You gonna be okay?”

  “Ughhh.”

  “Shit,” Red thought, returning to his own room and lighting up his hash

  pipe. He heard the shower going from her room. Now, that’s a good woman. She don’t want to smell bad.

  Maud came to him scented in creamy, dreamy stuff. He’d have to get the name of it for Greta.

  Colors!

  In the courtyard Esteemed Personage gathered at the flagpole, and while the White Wolf flag was lowered, they all howled “Aaahhhhweeee! Aaaarhaweeee!” after which Wreck, damaged from cocaine, shot off a few clips. Wreck staggered .. .

  “Aaaaahhhhhhhuuuuuuwwweeeeee!” his patriots answered, and began shooting off clips of their own.

  From a distant place, a coyote responded.

  Maud and Red excused themselves from dinner, taking a stomach-settling diet in his room. It made no never mind, because Wreck was unconscious.

  “I saw the devil today,” she said, “and I’m part of him.”

  “Speaking of the devil, how about a ‘lude?”

  “Is that a ‘lude or a lewd proposition1?”

  “Take it and find out.” Down the hatch with a back of hashish. And soon the devil was all gone. Red set her up on the high bed and kicked off his boots.

  “I’ve got to say, Red, you feel good.”

  “Crocodile skin and all.”

  “Yeah .. . cowboy .. . yeah .. .”

  “Aaaaahhhhwwweeee,” he crooned.

  “Assssahhhhhweeee,” she responded.

  FOUR CORNERS-LABOR DAY WEEKEND

  SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 2007 Sun’s first rays slithered over the rocky bivouac as the hated reveille sounded from a bugler. A groan rose en masse all over the Eagle Scout encampment. Four hundred of them ran, shoeless for the most part and naked, to where Montezuma Creek trickled past under a bluff.

  Scout masters hustled them. The sun went up high, quickly. Sounds of splattering urine as four hundred young men took turns over the slit trenches.

  The column had been in the desert for three days, planning to reach their destination of Mexican Hat at the tip of Glen Canyon day after tomorrow.

  Two other columns of Eagle Scouts traversed from different directions toward Mexican Hat. When they converged, twelve hundred, one fourth of the total national number of Eagle Scouts, would hold a jamboree: boating, rafting, a thou
sand contests of skill and endurance, songs, camp fires.

  The President of the United States was due to fly in and address them on Monday!

  Hank Skelley, a revered old scout master, sat in a circle of his

  company leaders, pondering a map. Hank was a lean rod of spring steel

  with dedication to the movement emanating from every move and gesture. Around him, a smell of bacon to revive any flagging spirits.

  Hank looked at his watch. Five A.M.

  “We didn’t pull our weight yesterday. Those trucks breaking down screwed up our entire transport. Darned if we can make it into Mexican Hat tomorrow if we skirt this row of canyons as originally planned.”

  Hank’s long, thin, arthritic finger traced an alternative route. “We can cut off about nine and a half miles if we go straight up Six Shooter Canyon.”

  “Where does the end of the canyon lead us?”

  “Into the rear of an outfit called Hudson Mining and Cattle, a big tumbleweed ranch.”

  “I heard that Hudson Mining has some Utah militia training, and they are none too friendly.”

  “Well,” Hank answered, “I tried to reach them by cellular phone to get permission to pass through, but their phone didn’t answer.

  “Webster,” Hank said to the chief master of Colorado. Webster Penrose inched to the front. “I don’t think anything goes up Six Shooter Canyon anymore, but I’ve flown over it constantly and had occasion to go for three miles to a wide water hole .. . right here .. . Bloody Gulch. Now, I don’t think it’s dangerous, except in a winter flash flood that sets the rocks spilling down.”

  “Suppose we go in as far as the ranch and are turned away? What about that, Hank?”

  “Then we go back to Bloody Gulch and pick up a goat trail out of the canyon. It will put us on the Navajo reservation, and we still will have saved several hours.”

  “Possible injuries, Hank?”

  “Nothing we can’t deal with,” Webster Penrose interrupted. “We have a helicopter on standby in Farmington.”

  At the rear of the circle a clicking sound accompanied by bells hinging turned attention to Brad Bradley, trying to raise White Wolf on his personal computer.

  “What kind of shit is this?” Hank Skelley exploded. “Trucks to carry off our bedding and kitchen, ground-control satellites, computers, evacuation helicopter. Excuse my obscenity, but we are Eagle Scouts and we aren’t ready to come in out of the cold.”

  Agreed. No one had disagreed with Hank for five years, maybe longer.

  They broke camp. Bedrolls, the kitchen, and dead weight were piled to be picked up by trucks. Each scout had a two canteen limit of water for the five miles through the canyon, and each hoped to find sweet water at Bloody Gulch.

  Fall in! Pep-talk time. Ranging back and forth with megaphone, Hank Skelley yelled out that this column held more boys from more states than the other columns. “We will reach Mexican Hat first or croak trying!”

  “Let’s hear it for Hank Skelley!”

  “Hip-hip-hooray!”

  “Number one to Mexican Hat!”

  Chester Skelley, Hank’s grandson and one of the most decorated scouts in the West, was called front and center to take his place alongside Hank to lead them into Six Shooter Canyon a few miles past the stream.

  Chester felt faint and of throbbing heart as the pride in him swelled. He knew it was probably his grandfather’s last forced march. Getting there first would take daring. Chester knew about courage. He had fought his way back from a near-crippling childhood disease with superhuman determination.

  Singing stopped as they faced the sheer walls and narrow path of Six

  Shooter Canyon. A huge sign read: CLOSED; DANGEROUS; DO NOT ENTER, and accordion barbed wire covered its mouth.

  “You sure about this?” Brad Bradley asked.

  “It’s public land and we are American citizens,” Hank responded. He knew it was his last jamboree. He knew he had to get there first even though the other columns had easier routes. This five-mile push through Six Shooter would end up in legend and song.

  Fifty yards in, a boulder blocked the trail. Chester scatted up, found the footings, and extended his hand to his grandfather. As the young man pulled the old master up, it became a golden instant. Their eyes met for only a blink, and their smiles were just as quick. One generation was making, one generation was taking its passage.

  And on, into the valley.

  The red alert phone in Wreck Hudson’s room rang unmercifully. Wreck was flung awry onto the couch, buck naked. The phone persisted. Wreck jerked the cord from the wall, threw the phone through the window, and stood up wavering.

  The girls were gone. Second time this week. He’d have to see about assigning a male orderly. Like today, he was having a difficult time with the arms and legs of his clothing.

  Wreck felt better when he strapped on his pearl-handled pistol. Shiiiiuuuuut! He didn’t have pants on, and the pistols fell to the ground.

  A pounding on his door. Wreck managed to put both legs in one pant leg and fell flat on his face as he reached for the doorknob.

  “You dumb son of a bitch!” Wreck greeted Sergeant Floyd.

  “Sorry, sir, I got a call from outpost number seven over the center of the canyon. Dust is rising at the far end.”

  “Why didn’t you say so!”

  “I tried to phone you, but.. . you shot up the outside phone lines last night.”

  “Call all stations, a double-red alert and move all personnel to the horseshoe posts.”

  “I did that, sir.”

  “What the fuck—who authorized you?”

  Down the corridor, Red Peterson came out of his reverie. Maud was gone, but Jesus H. Christ, did that old girl give me a time when the lude kicked in. Was there any way Maud could teach some of that screaming and cursing to Greta? Sometimes Greta acted like the statues she portrayed on the stairs in Vegas.

  The continuous sound of a racket filled the hallway. Maud, showered and dressed, came in and nodded toward the sounds of confusion.

  Wreck blammed open their door. “We’ve got a problem!”

  “Well, Christ, let me get my pants on.”

  “There’s dust blowing up the canyon.”

  “Hey, Wreck, dust is always blowing through the canyons.”

  “Maybe it’s a herd of buffalo,” Maud ventured.

  “There ain’t no goddamn buffalos, and there ain’t no goddamn wind.”

  “Esteemed Personage,” Grand Militia Sergeant Floyd said, “maybe it’s cattle rustled from Mexico and being hidden in the canyon.”

  “I don’t think so,” Red said. “You can’t drive a herd of stolen cattle clear through the state of Arizona and into Utah without being spotted. You there, Sergeant, get Wreck’s vehicle warmed up. We’re right behind you.”

  They halted on the steep trail fifty yards below a rock strewn summit.

  Wreck shifted into compound low to scale the hill. The hill won.

  He came to the guard post where a dozen White Wolves had gathered and screamed at them to take up positions.

  Red Peterson, meanwhile, scanned through binoculars. His wise old eye always searched for the patch of black gold. “Yeah,” he said softly, “I see them. They’re taking a rest stop at Bloody Gulch.”

  “Who? How many?” Wreck cried.

  “Wreck,” Red said softly, “I think you’d better get down there and meet them and either turn them back or let them through. Get rid of all that crap you’re wearing and look like a rancher.”

  *

  “You dumb son of a bitch,” Wreck screamed.

  Red seized him and with one hand lifted him off the ground and held him, nose to nose. “No goddamn commander is going to run troops into a box canyon in broad daylight. If this was an attack by armed forces, you’d be obliterated in five minutes. Now, you get down there.”

  “You!”

  “Grand Militia Sergeant Buck Jones, sir!”

  “Get your ass down there and turn t
hose people around.”

  “No, sir, I ain’t going.” Jones quivered. He was silenced by Wreck’s .45-caliber slugs. Wreck turned to the other patriots, who slunk off to their posts.

  Peterson led Maud a few feet away. “We’re getting the hell out of here,” he whispered. “I’m grabbing one of their Uzi guns and clean this post out. When I open fire, get down the hill and into the Land Rover. He left the keys in the ignition.”

  In the next agonizing moments, the cloud of dust stirred up again and spewed. Wreck was frozen .. . immobile. As fast as a lizard’s tongue, Red snatched the Uzi from a patriot and tried to slam a bullet into its chamber. It was stuck!

  “You motherfucker!” Wreck Hudson screamed.

  Red threw the weapon to the ground and shook his head, crying, “I brought in two hundred thousand of these guns, and I’ve got to get the one that jammed.”

  “Kill the motherfuckers,” Wreck ordered.

  The five other patriots poured gunfire into Red Peterson and Maud Traynor, shot up until body parts came loose.

  Deep in the canyon below, the formation of Eagle Scouts closed up and tested the water in Bloody Gulch. Addition of iodine and a chemical packet would make it potable but terrible tasting.

  Fortunately, the canyon walls shut out most of the sunshine and the rocks had a cooling effect on the adventurers, but it was hot!

  It had been a hell of a morning! Skating over rocks, clinging to side walls—slow, torturous movement had sucked them fairly well dry in those first three miles.

  Chester Skelley now limped slightly in deference to his weaker leg. His grandfather met his eyes. Both of them rolled a glance heavenward. No songs this break.

  Chester Skelley knew that if they had to climb a goat trail out of Bloody Gulch, old Hank would be in some kind of trouble. Hank was chilled by the thought he had made a bad decision.

  An advance party of scouts went a half mile and returned with good news that the final two-mile stretch seemed flat and friendly.

  The scout masters argued respectfully. One of three choices: two miles up the canyon to the ranch or take the goat trail and climb on cliff sides two thousand vertical feet, or return to Montezuma Creek and truck into the jamboree.